Hello, users! 👋

Today I wanted to share one of the worst experiences I had teaching a coworker, I was his 'mentor' when he joined the team. I was so excited but... It turned out so badly.

Presentations

I'll call this guy Davos. Davos joined our team with an evident lack of english knowledge and conversation. (We were all spanish so we could communicate with him, but our entire work and documentation was writen in english).

Our team leader decided that I could teach him about the technologies we were using, the structure of the project and our team's philosophy.

I collected our team progress, wrote some guides, documentation, exercises and step-by-step guides for him (all in spanish of course)... Which he totally ignored.

The smelly Davos behaviour

Davos did anything.

I noticed he opened the guides/exercises when I was around but closed all up when I walked away.

In our progression meetings I saw he was doing nothing, still he didn't had "any doubts to ask". He started saying "that the techs we were using in our project sucked, that the techs he knew worked better". He tried to do some tasks with those "better techs of him" and failed, but still kept on using what he wanted.

My team leader told me to sit with him and actually make him do something. I tried, he totally ignored me, so I just gave him a simple task and opened a tab with the step-by-step doing of the task, then left. He closed the tab and then asked another male colleague how to do the task... This collegue opened the same tab I opened and explained the same thing I did. Davos told him: "WOW man, thank you! You rock!". I was speechless.

This happened twice. And a third time. And a fourth time. And so on. He was constantly avoiding and ignoring my explanations, closing the Chrome tabs of documentation that I opened for him when I was away, and asking the same thing to male colleagues... Which explained him the same things and opened the same docs.

As far as I saw I was loosing my time, because he only listened to male colleagues. So I told my team leader that I wouldn't deal with him anymore.

What finally happened

After 2 months, Davos mentorship finished. He pushed a corrupted version of our project with +100 errors and destroying our 6-months-work.

I'm thankful to god that the commits were reversible and we got back all our efforts.

Davos was finally fired because of so many reasons plus some of the mentioned above.

In conclusion

This was by far the worst experience I had while teaching someone at work.

After that I had all good experiences, but I always remember Davos and I feel his behaviour in many aspects was totally out of any sense.

What about you? Did you had a really bad experiencie while teaching/mentoring someone?